December 16, 2007
Pickle Me This Picks of '07
These are my picks, my favourites, which is why I don’t feel bad that so few were authored by men (though does it count that another author has a man’s name?). I don’t claim that they’re the Best books of 2007 (though they might be) but just my best. I did try to read more books by men this year, by resolution, as I’d so been neglecting that poor gender. And I’m better for it, but still the books women write seem to be the ones I like the very best, however diverse they might be amongst themselves. What follows are such books, listed in the order in which I encountered them.
New Fiction
- Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert (From my review: “a startlingly original novel… What do you do with the past once it’s over?”)
- The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly (From my review: “her achievement is creating a novel so truly beautiful out of some of the ugliest stuff the world has on offer.”)
- Certainty by Madeleine Thien (From my review: “…ultimately it is the sum of these stories which provides the “certainty” amidst uncertainty: meaning is evident, and beauty abounds.”)
- The Ladies’ Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer (From my review: “Here is a summer book through and through, all the while substantial, well-written.”)
- Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (From my post-review: “has been positively haunting me since I read it.”)
- Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood (From my review: ” Rosie Little is “the next Bridget Jones” for which we’ve been longing for ten years.”)
- Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay (From my review: “This book feels too whole to have been created… [A]n entity unto itself, its own world, and a truly magnificent literary achievement.”)
- Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani (From my review: “The Stone Diaries without the ghost, but also something original, beautiful, gentle and lovely in its own right.”)
- The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys (From my review: “The Thames freezing is a perfect example of an extraordinary moment in time… and Humphreys links these moments together in this small beautiful book.”)
- The Great Man by Kate Christensen (From my review: “There is joy here, and there’s goodness, and the whole wide world, which is certainly something for a book.”)
New Non-Fiction
- Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
- Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford by Jessica Mitford
- The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
- Cake or Death by Heather Mallick
- 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa by Stephanie Nolen
- A Memoir of Friendship: Shields and Howard by Blanche and Allison Howard (eds.)
- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
- Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong
- Ambivalence by Jonathan Garfinkel
Not New but Glad I Discovered
- Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe
- Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
December 16, 2007
Life in a Northern Town
On this Sunday cars so insistent on not heeding weather warnings have become marooned, abandoned by their drivers, and now they’re buried up to their mirrors in drifts outside my house and I’ve got no place to be but here with my best company, good smoked cheddar cheese, and books and periodicals begging for reading.
December 14, 2007
My almost-absolute failure
Lately it’s been very convenient having an award-winning writer for a friend, for upon the completion of my novel two weeks back, Rebecca was kind enough to read it. And indeed she has offered wonderful encouragement, good advice and insight. (Which I will apply to my manuscript over my Christmas Holiday! How fortunate to have the time when I most need it). The most fascinating of all her feedback though is a note of my almost-absolute failure to use subordinate conjunctions. And and and and and, which I suppose is to be expected from anyone who talks too much (and I’ve been accused of this since I learned to speak). What about the “buts” and “thens” though? Reading through another story this evening I realize my “problem” (which it isn’t, entirely) is completely out of control. Causality where art thou? Fascinating. I will explore this further throughout my revisions, then I will use this awareness to strengthen my work, but I will not cease my ands completely for ands are what I do (so it seems). There.
December 13, 2007
Five years ago
It was five years ago today that I went out on the town with this lady, and met a boy who danced as badly as I do. And so much fun and adventure has ensued ever since then.
The moral of the story is that you might just meet your husband in a crowded bar.
December 13, 2007
People instead of their societies
Now reading Ambivalence by Jonathan Garfinkel, and delighting in people instead of just their societies. Which I think might just be the theme of the book, so that’s fortunate. This is the second-last book of my non-fiction commitment and it has been a good ride. Though probably in the future I won’t non-fic in such a binge. I miss the truth and certainty of fiction, and though I have learned very much, my own writing is starting to suffer from a paucity of inspiration. One needs both worlds, I think. But I resolved to read all these books for they were ones I’d been putting off and putting off, and I had to resolve that now was the time sometime. It’s been good for me I think, though now that the end is in sight, I am longing for a prize– a good novel. But there is still good reading to be had in the meantime. A book is a book is a book.
December 12, 2007
Post on my mind
Steph with more to say about post has reminded me of my own Ultimate Post Office Story from when we lived in Japan two and a half years ago– do have a read. And I will shut up about post soon, but these days as I read 800 pages of letters, visit my local PO weekly and anticipate red envelopes in my mailbox every day (and they’re beginning to trickle in) the whole thing is very very much on my mind. With pleasure.
December 12, 2007
Education, Enlightenment and Delight
Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech was so urgent. Indeed I’m not sure how one could learn to be anything without a houseful of books (as insulation and inspiration), however metaphoric or otherwise.
She writes: “We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”
She raises the question, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
And it’s an interesting question. Lessing is right, though even if I didn’t think so, she knows better than I do. There is something to be said for listening to one’s elders. The world is where it’s at, and books are its closest cousin, but though I do suspect that a whole day passed on the internet would not be one most productive, so often does the internet manage to serve as a portal not only to literature, but also to the rest of the whole wide world.
Of course my perspective is probably skewed– I tend to stick to bookish blogs and websites anyway. But all the same, just look what I’ve found there lately: Lessing’s speech for starters, which was published in a newspaper halfway around the world; fascinatingly on “little people” in British literature; thoughts on readers within literature; on friendship and what poetry can do; a video of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on African writing; some book recommendations.
This year internet sources have pointed me towards books as follows: here for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; here for anything by Kate Christensen; here for Lucky Jim; here for Penelope Fitzgerald (and how fitting! She’s blogged about her today) and Persephone books; I found Laurie Colwin here; and I could go on, but now, in fact, I am beginning to waste time. (See Ms. Lessing, I am listening).
Just as I believe there is no great disconnect between literature and the world, neither does the internet exist in a vacuum; these are worlds which can feed one another. Of course it’s possible to to waste time on the internet, as it’s possible to waste time anywhere, but if you’re discriminating and discerning enough, you can harness the medium. Look around and see that the internet can take you exactly where you want to go– not just towards amusement, but onwards to sources of education, enlightenment, and delight.
December 12, 2007
Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital
Last month I read Janette Turner Hospital’s new novel Orpheus Lost, and have followed up with a “critical duet” of sorts with Steven W. Beattie at The Shakespeherian Rag. I enjoyed the book a great deal, Steven did less so, and what results is a pretty interesting dialogue, I think. I will post the beginning, and then you can follow the link over to read the rest.
Kerry Clare: I’d never read anything by Janette Turner Hospital before, and she definitely surprised me. I was aware that she is as American as she is Canadian, and that she is Australian first and foremost, but somehow I still expected her work to be representative of the sort of fiction Canada’s female writers seem to write best. The sort of fiction that I like best for that matter, of kitchens and caves, mothers, daughters, and divining.
The premise of Orpheus Lost would suggest otherwise though, wouldn’t it? This story of Leela, who studies the mathematics of music and falls in love with Mishka in the subway as he plays Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice” on his violin. Mishka, whose strange disappearances begin to coincide with terrorist attacks in Boston. Soon Leela is snatched off the street on her way home and taken to an interrogation centre where she is confronted by Cobb, a figure from her past, and questions of Mishka being a terrorist.
Thrills and chills, international crime and intrigue. What a treat, I discovered quickly. To read a plot-driven book for once, and have it be so good. To be unable to stop turning the pages until I’d reached the end. I was choking on my heart a number of times, and one day this book extended my lunch break by an extra half-hour. There was no other way.
I do love it when literary fiction manages to surmount the limits of “genre.” To borrow the best of other genres, using it to great advantage. And indeed Turner Hospital does sufficient borrowing here — with the Greek allusions, musical references, spy plots, and romance. Orpheus Lost is a veritable stew, but reads quite originally, all its ingredients measured.
I found the story throughout quite compelling, but Turner Hospital’s depiction of the Australian rainforest was striking in particular. Of course the rainforest is a place that lends itself to story, and Turner Hospital properly invests it with elements of the fantastic, but that somewhere so unknown to me could emerge so vividly is still a testament to her achievements. Conversely the story lagged just a bit for me with Leela’s backstory, which takes place in a small Southern town I felt I’d read about already.
Leela and Mishka’s relationship was hard to understand at first, though with two such eccentric characters, this is unsurprising. Some of the woodenness of their dialogue is easily attributed to the fact that they’re both so unconventional, and so too would be their romance. Words are neither of their fortes. Turner Hospital conveys their respective passions (math and music) well, and also marries them together. Though not so easily — nothing is easy here, and I respect that. The Orpheus story never exactly matches this modern version, piece for piece. Many characters do remain insoluble equations.
So I could continue here, picking the pieces of Orpheus Lost apart, but I will conclude now instead by stating this book is much more interesting as a whole than these pieces are in isolation. That Orpheus Lost is altogether riveting and well-orchestrated, and that it works. Or at least it worked for me.
How about you?
***
Steven W. Beattie: I’m going to be the dissenting voice here. Orpheus Lost was, for me, a major disappointment… Read the rest.
December 11, 2007
Ramona Forever
My splendid holidays begin next Wednesday (!!) and go on long, and I’ve got nothing planned but reading sweet reading. However this article revisiting Beverly Cleary (via Kate) has inspired me to reread my copy of Ramona Forever over the break. I used to have all the Ramona books, but that was probably twenty years ago and I’ve so stupidly let all the others get away from me in the meantime. So terribly stupidly that that I’ve still got one left is a bit of a miracle and means those books must have been special– and they were. (Did anyone else notice the inaccuracy in the article though? Because not just “Ralph Mouse” has made it to TV, as I have very vivid memories of rushing home from various places in time to watch the 1988 Ramona TV series on CBC starring Sarah Polley).
Another children’s book lined up for the holidays is The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston.
